Pourquoi « comment vous appelez-vous », et pas « quel est votre nom » comme en anglais ?Well I think my answer leads to an obvious answer : Germanic languages, such as German, former English (with hoten, see my message), Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish,etc, use the same syntax, which is "How are you called". Latin languages, or at least Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese use "How do you call yourself". The link is actually quite obvious, isn't it ? Actually, despite what the OP said about this way of asking being "special" for French (which is not, it's the same for all latin languages I quoted above), if you look closer, English is the special case here.